Office landscape
1950s movement in open office space planning
Office landscape (German: Bürolandschaft/Großraumbüro) was an early (1950s) movement in open plan office space planning that typically used irregular geometry and organic circulation patterns.
History
The general European mentality towards innovative forms of office design in the 1940 and 1950s was that of caution and hesitation following the devastating effects left from WWI and WWII. Before the 1950s, the majority of offices in Europe operated with closed-door offices and scaled-down versions of the massive bullpen offices that were found in skyscrapers across the U.S. But the postwar environment proved fertile to economic growth from massive amounts of reconstruction, and one country that had a particularly fast rate of growth was Germany. The quick emergence in manufacturing, paired with a new mentality of wanting to pave over their brutal past, left Germany open to new thinking. This openness led to the interjection of a concept that would quickly populate areas all over Europe and North America.
In 1958, the Quickborner consulting group was established by two brothers, Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle, who had previously been working as assistants in their father’s furniture studio. Upon founding Quickborner outside of Hamburg as a space planning firm, the two brothers soon developed an interest in office space. They saw the current status quo, which used versions of scientific management and consisted of uninspired rows of desks and a strict office hierarchy as an opportunity for change. They wanted to create a system where the individual is the focus, and rebel against the strict grid of corridors and desks with something organic and natural. Their approach was called Bürolandschaft, a German term that translates to “office landscape”.
Social theory
The post-World War II social-democratic environment in many Northern European countries engendered an egalitarian management approach.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Office landscape” as 1950s movement in open office space planning. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as 1950s movement in open office space planning. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 6, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2278590. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1940 and 1958.
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This entry incorporates text from “Office landscape” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.